Cette année, le rapport sur L’État de la sécurité alimentaire et de la nutrition dans le monde marque l’avènement d’une ère nouvelle de suivi des progrès accomplis pour parvenir à un monde libéré de la faim et de la malnutrition, dans le cadre défini par les objectifs de développement durable (ODD). Plus précisément, le rapport rendra compte désormais des avancées réalisées pour atteindre les cibles associées à l’élimination de la faim et à la prévention de toutes les formes de malnutrition. Il comportera également des analyses thématiques montrant en quoi la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition sont liées à d’autres cibles des ODD. Le champ d’étude ayant été étendu au thème de la nutrition, le Fonds des Nations Unies pour l’enfance (UNICEF) et l’Organisation mondiale de la Santé (OMS) ont rejoint le groupe de partenaires élaborant habituellement ce rapport annuel, à savoir, la FAO, le Fonds international de développement agricole (FIDA) et le Programme alimentaire mondial (PAM). Nous espérons que le partenariat élargi nous aidera à mieux comprendre les diverses dimensions de ce qu’il faut faire pour éliminer la faim et toutes les formes de malnutrition et se traduira par des actions intégrées permettant d’atteindre ce but essentiel.

The 2016 Rural Development Report focuses on inclusive rural transformation as a central element of the global efforts to eliminate poverty and hunger, and build inclusive and sustainable societies for all. It analyses global, regional and national pathways of rural transformation, and suggests four categories into which most countries and regions fall, each with distinct objectives for rural development strategies to promote inclusive rural transformation: to adapt, to amplify, to accelerate, and a combination of them.

Today more people live in cities than ever before, but we still depend on rural areas for our food. In the developing world, up to 80 per cent of food is produced on small farms that are usually family-run. Yet it’s also true that 70 per cent of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas, where the lack of opportunity is forcing many young rural people to leave their homes in search of work in overcrowded cities or abroad.

FAO, IFAD and WFP welcome this global commitment to end poverty, hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Our proposal on how to achieve zero hunger by 2030 is in the context of the proposed Sustainable Development Goal to eliminate hunger and malnutrition by 2030, which, in turn, goes hand-in-hand with the proposed Sustainable Development Goal 1 to eliminate poverty at the same time. With almost 800 million people suffering from hunger and almost four-fifths of the extreme poor living in rural areas, it is necessary to raise agricultural and rural incomes to achieve those two priority Sustainable Development Goals.

This year´s annual State of Food Insecurity in the World report takes stock of progress made towards achieving the internationally established hunger targets, and reflects on what needs to be done, as we transition to the new post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda. United Nations member states have made two major commitments to tackle world hunger. The first was at the World Food Summit (WFS), in Rome in 1996, when 182 governments committed “... to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015”. The second was the formulation of the First Millennium Development Goal (MDG 1), established in 2000 by the United Nations members, which includes among its targets “cutting by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015”. In this report, we review progress made since 1990 for every country and region as well as for the world as a whole. First, the good news: overall, the commitment to halve the percentage of hungry people, that is, to reach the MDG 1c target, has been almost met at the global level. More importantly, 72 of the 129 countries monitored for progress have reached the MDG target, 29 of which have also reached the more ambitious WFS goal by at least halving the number of undernourished people in their populations.